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Comment by r_hoods_ghost | Hacker News Reader

Unity is cheaper only in certain circumstances. UE5 is free and then you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenues over $1m. This avoids a lot of the issues faced by indie developers with the new pricing model (having to pay for copies you give away, having to pay a flat fee that eats the profit margin of 99p games, needing to pay for a subscription up front etc.)

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Unreal is cheaper if you intend to stay within the free threshold of less than $1 million in sales, you can't beat free. But if you have dreams of having a hit with more than $1million then I can't find any scenarios where unreal is cheaper. Let me know if you can think of an example. And very very quickly unreal is more expensive.

For example at $2 million in revenue unreal would cost $50k in royalties. Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees. If your game is priced at $10, that's just $1k in install fee vs the same $50k in fees to unreal.

>Assuming a game with a price of $1 and 2 million installs unity is $10k in install fees.

Assuming Unity Pro ($2000 per seat per year) - first 1000000 installs are free, next 1000000 priced as follows: 0.15 * 100000 + 0.075 * 400000 + 0.03 * 500000 = 60000$ + Unity Pro for each seat.

You're right, I used the $0.01 as basis because I thought the fees were lifetime and you would quickly accrue over the 500k installs mark. But it turns out that it was per-month which makes unity much more expensive than I thought. That's shocking to me and means low earning games with moderate volumes would suffer painfully and pay substantially more than unreal. Damn that sucks.

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